The Jewish Name Game

Ace feature writer Lenore Skenazy kindly quoted me in an article in the new issue of the Forward titled, "When a Name Screams 'I'm Jewish!'" I finally made it into the fabled Forward, which has printed my acerbic letters on stories before, but this is the first time I cracked its editorial pages. Skenazy writes,

But then there are those who wouldn’t give up the identifying moniker for anything. “I enjoy having a Jewish last name because it much better identifies me as a Jew than does my first name,” said Van Wallach, a proposal writer at an accounting firm. His dad was crazy about racecars, so he was named for a British car from the 1950s, the Vanwall. (His brother Cooper was also named for a car.) “If I was a girl,” Wallach added, “I would have been Jaguar.”

The part of the article that amused me the most were the quotes from one woman (I won't say which) whom I had met on Jdate in the mid-2000s. We haven't had any contact in years, but if I can dig up her email address I'll drop her a line and say, "Hey, we'll always be connected through Lenore's Jewish-names article in the Forward. Small world, isn't it?"

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/181152/when-a-name-screams-im-jewish/?p=all#ixzz2aOclvETC